Sunday, December 9, 2012

A little over a year ago, I got a strange request from my sister to make a longcat scarf. How long should a longcat scarf be? I decided very long... but also I was on a budget so I bought 2m of fleece but made 4m of scarf.
It was a lot of scarf.

Decided after that epic scarf, I'd make one for myself but leave it at a more sensible 2m.

Been wearing it around for a while and then someone said to me... hey you could probably sell those. Hm. Interesting. I'll think about it.
A few weeks later, someone else asks if I made the longcat scarf and if they could commission one as a gift. Okay I'll think about it. This time I actually sat down, figured out material costs and time costs and came up with a reasonable number that didn't seem insane. I ask commissioner of scarf if the price was okay and they said it was reasonable so off I went making scarves.

Two of the above are now spoken for - the third is on ebay awaiting a good home. Third has been sold, made another one, put it on ebay, friend bought that one.

I've got a few plans for possible Tacgnol/Longcat combinations but I'll wait and see how these do first.

Friday, December 7, 2012

Apparently back in October I forgot to write about some laser cut rings I made.

A friend happened to be in the space after I made these and gave me some tips since they're a bit melted. Need to use less power and multiple passes next time.

More recently I learned of Plastic Weld which is a solvent that you use to "glue" (chemically melt & fuse) acrylic together. Just tried it out on a random 5mm mirrored perspex dot I've been keeping around since the prototype for the Infinity Box.

So awesome. So easy. Just hold the pieces in place with one hand, use a small brush to brush the Plastic Weld into the join and it wicks along by capillary action. Done in seconds. This basically means I can make boxes... or whole cases like those in galleries! This is exciting news, especially as I'm too lazy to design boxes with all those tabs or little slots for bolts & nuts (as in the design for the Ice Tube Clock).

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Kate is a bad influence on me. Or a good one, I'm not sure which anymore... She made me discover many My Little Pony merchandise, like colouring books. One of the things she used the colouring books for was to transfer pony designs to shrinky plastic (known as Shrinkles in the UK and Shrinky Dinks in the US).
Lately I've seen a lot of MLP jewellery designs using the shrink plastic so I wanted to give it a try. What can be better than infinite pony fan art?

First, I tried to trace a really big Fluttershy... The instructions said it shrinks 7 times smaller. So I measured before
(look at those impressive tracing, colouring and cutting skills!)
And after
And found it really only shrinks down by 2.5 times or so (thanks to Kimball for using MATHS to work this out for me because my brain was slow and addled by plastic fumes).

I realised after making the Fluttershy that ponies don't have black outlines, so I made this Pinkie Pie
I really love her expression in this one. From the original I traced, her head was more down and she was much more shy looking but this is still lovely and I'll probably make it into a necklace for myself soon.

Figured to try something a bit smaller... Gummy! Pinkie Pie's pet toothless alligator.
Would have been a little better if it was a little bigger so you can see he's hanging onto something by his mouth.

and even smaller...
Copied from a mini colouring book, it was a sort of illumination on a games page. Still the most pretty tiny thing ever.

I'm sure I could come up with more ideas for this stuff and I bought quite a bit of shrinkles too. One idea that has come to mind is possibly ... mouse-sized butterfly wings. Combining the mouse taxidermy with the Rarity's wings from Sonic Rainboom MLP... Might be interesting. Or just pretty and weird. Either way it's good.